An American Prisoner's Wife

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The powerful, poignant story an indomitable woman who challenged corruption in order to free her husband.

When TV reporter Jodie Sinclair went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as the Death House at Angola, in 1981, she expected to report about the death penalty and leave. She never expected to fall in love. Billy Sinclair was an inmate at Angola, sent there for an accidental murder during a robbery-gone-wrong. After a trail which was skewed against him and sentenced to life behind bars, he saw first-hand the corruption and abuse rife in the criminal justice system, and he began an unrelenting crusade for reform. When the pair married by proxy a year after meeting, Jodie took up Billy’s fight.

From then on, she lived with one foot in the outside world and one in the complex and dehumanizing bureaucracy of the prison world. This incredible memoir tracks her heroic twenty-five-year fight—through Billy’s health concerns, her own professional setbacks for her association with a criminal, and a pardons scandal and FBI investigation that revealed corruption in the criminal justice system leading all the way to the governor’s office which put a target on Billy’s back—to save her husband from dying behind bars. It is the uplifting true story of a woman who stood by her man, and in doing so, exposed the horrors of our criminal justice system and became a voice for all those who have loved ones behind bars.